


Sometime to Return

by Tealot



Category: Norman Reedus RPF Boondock Saints RPF The Walking Dead RPF
Genre: Other, RPF
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-25
Updated: 2017-06-25
Packaged: 2018-11-19 02:11:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11303592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tealot/pseuds/Tealot
Summary: Thoughts from a friend.





	Sometime to Return

**Author's Note:**

> For Church, who told me.

He showed up at my door last week in the middle of the night, all sweat and road dirt and tired, hollowed out eyes. The way he’s always looked every time he’s ever shown up, unannounced and uninvited and only standing in front of me because he needs something and knows I’ll open the door.

 

  
I'd barely spoken before the tears started and he broke, standing there on my porch with me still mostly asleep and reeling from bedtime meds that made it a miracle I'd even heard him ring the bell.  
Not that it was difficult to know what to do. It's what I've always done. Gather him up and hold on and let him cry it out. Whatever it is. He doesn't usually say but I know that's because he doesn't usually have words for it. He just breaks. The weight of who he is and how he has to live get to be too much and when he can't stand up under it he comes to me. He always has. Even during the years we didn't speak he somehow always managed to get himself into my proximity and a situation where I'd find him. Stumble onto him, cursing myself a fool for not just walking away as soon as I recognized him but I've never been able to deny his pain.

 

  
He knows it.

 

  
Even all the money, all the good fortune, all the beautiful, fancy homes, and he has four that I'm aware of now; the bikes and cars and beautiful famous friends don't change that weight on him. It was there when he was dirt poor and struggling, when he was at odds with everyone and lonely, when he was selling himself to the highest bidder and hating himself with every fiber of his being and it's there now that he's rich and famous , well thought of and loved, though I suppose he's always been loved because no matter what he's loved with an intensity that defies both description and logic. Believe me I know.

  
It doesn't mitigate that weight. It has nothing to do with his life and everthing to do with what his head does to him. The voices shouting at him. A self loathing that runs bone deep, that digs into the meat of his brain and makes it bleed.

  
That little room in his brain that keeps a running tally of everything he's ever done wrong, real or imaginary, every hurt he's ever inflicted no matter how minute, every word he regrets speaking, every look he thinks was misinterpreted, every misunderstanding, awkward moment, bad judgement call.  
Of the good he has little recollection, of the bad total recall.  
Growing with the years as of course it must when you carry all that shit around with you, and he buckles under it with no easily understandable trigger.

  
He just breaks.

  
I suppose it's better than what he used to do, which was swallow it and swallow it and swallow it, pushing it down until he couldn't stand it anymore and then vomiting it out until veins burst in his eyes and his nose bled and his throat was raw and swollen. If he couldn't throw up on his own he drank salt water, or swallowed ipecac and mustard powder or just jammed his fingers down his throat until he set it off and sometimes he'd vomit until he hurt himself but in the end he felt better.

  
The weight was gone for a while once he was husked out like that.

  
He came to me then, too. That sick he didn't want to be alone, couldn't bear to be alone. And me, no matter what was going on I'd drop it, stop it, close it, shutter it and sit with him, holding his head, rubbing his back, telling him he was ok and he'd feel better soon until sometimes I thought my throat hurt as much as his did.  
Hours if we were lucky, but more often days.

  
He doesn't do that anymore. Now he just cries, but it's just as soul destroying, just as debilitating. Blinding, screaming sobbing that strips him raw, leaves him stuck in those hitching, gasping breaths that aren't real breathing at all and more often than not tumble him into a migraine of epic proportions, agonized and nauseated and curled up on my sofa in a misery so complete it's impossible to understand how he survives it.  
And I just hold him, work his hands out of his hair when he pulls it, slip my fingers under his when his nails cut into his palms, tell him he's ok. Sometimes I cry with him.

 

And then when it's over and the shakes have stopped, the tears dried, the pain gone, at least for the moment, he splits a six pack with me and goes on his way and I may not hear from him again until, months later, the weight begins to crush him again.

 

It's always me he comes to, and it always has been, and there's never been a time I turned him away, not even when after the one time I needed him to be there he ran and I wrote him out of my life.

 

How he came back into it I don't know. It just happened. He asked me once if I let him back in because of The Walking Dead.  It's the closest I've come to hitting him for years.  I reminded him that I was around for Boondock Saints and every other movie and tv show and never gave a tinkers damn.  He backed off but he knew I was mad and went all skittish and silent and he left not much later.  

  
I'll never manage, I don't think, to work out if I'm happy or miserable having him back in my life, even though he's done everything he possibly can to make amends.

 

Because of him I may have as much as a decade left of life. Never let it be said he's not generous to a fault, and he's paid for all of the medical care I'll need to keep me alive as long as possible. I'm grateful, because with the care I could afford I was likely down to my last year or two.  
Doesn't change that when he found out about this illness I have he ran. It's in my mind every time I'm able to take the latest opportunity to heal me, every time my numbers fall back in line and it looks like I'll live a while longer.

 

Grateful. And resentful.

 

  
Bought and paid for and I can't help but think, sometimes, that now he knows I'll never turn him away.  
I never have and never will. Not as long as I draw breath will I ever turn him away, no bribes necessary, but he's not secure enough to understand that and trust it. Or maybe he does and just wants to be sure I draw breath as long as possible.  
And is he helping me live because he loves me and wants me to have life for me? Or because he loves me and doesn't want to not have me to pick his pieces up. And is it love if he only comes when he needs me? Never to visit. Never to just be friends together. Only when he's sad, or sick, or hurt, or broken. Always then. Always.

 

So last week, while fans online argued about where he was, I sat with him in my darkened living room, in a town none of them would ever think of, all the drapes closed to keep the light out of his migraine aching eyes, holding him while he cried and begged me not to let him go, laying cool clothes on his eyes and slipping zofran under his tongue while he fought nausea, until he could swallow the painkillers that finally killed the headache. Telling him he was ok.

 

When it was over we sat on the porch, drinking beer and not talking about much, and finally, after almost 30 hours, he got up to go. He was on his bike, engine running, when he stopped, put his foot back down, and called out; "Hey Church, c'mere."

  
And so I did, of course I did, and for the first time he looked at me and asked, in that old, normal, soft voice he's more or less thrown away in favor of his new happy personality for the masses; "Are YOU ok?"

  
He's never asked before.

  
I told him I was and he stared at me, a long, hard, completely unfamiliar stare, as if he wasn't sure he believed me and was trying to see the answer in my eyes.  
And then he nodded, waved, and drove away.

 

Three days later I got a phone call from a doctors

 

office. A specialist of a caliber I'd have never considered consulting on my own. They wanted to make an appointment and I made it.

 

I know who put that ball in play, but what I don't know is why. His motivations mystify me. I call him my friend but I think more realistically I'm his life raft and he's my...nothing.  
He's trying to save me but I think it's for him, rather than for me.

  
I don't know.

I love him.

It's impossible not to love him, because there's no harm in his soul, nothing but decency, honesty, and genuine good heartedness. But sometimes it's hard to like him, because as good a soul as he is those flaws of his makeup obviously haven't changed. All the years of nobody thinking of him that led him to habitually put his own self interest first because if he didn't, who would? Those sharp edges that stick out all over him; that cut deep if you happen to brush up against him.

The hidden sadness, insecurity. Madness.

  
He hurts and so he hurts. He doesn't mean to.

 

 


End file.
